How to Creatively strategise with Digital during Global crisis

It’s 2020 and the world’s taken a massive hit economically by the outbreak of COVID-19 – what does that mean for your business?

Two methods how businesses and international organisations have responded up till now:

Drastic financial cuts within company’s overall budget by furloughing staff, making redundancies, and minimising operational costs with uncertainty of how to recover or going out of business.

2. Creatively strategised innovative tactics and strategy on being advantageous to exploit business, marketing and entrepreneurial opportunities in economic downturn.

Now both our agency team and you reading this know very well how to respond within these times depends on your industry, expertise, company size and scope of operations.

However, even if your business or brand was a less-than-5-year start-up or an established player in the game; we must leverage and optimise what’s NOT on quarantine or lockdown – OUR digital marketing.

Whether influencers are dormant these days, offline marketing vendors have hung up their Closed till further notice signs, or other promotional stakeholders are quarantined themselves; your power lies within the internet for your digital marketing strategy.

Take time to observe what’s going on in people’s livelihoods and concerns, the wider society, global affairs and the aftermath of how people are responding to COVID-19; to even open holes within your competitors’ activities before formulating a plan of action.

You may not be trading and generating consistent revenue and cash flow in abundance, yet we’ll share with you some creative tactics to take advantage and control of any global crisis dilemma through digital marketing.

Let’s get started:

Plan out 3-4 crisis objectives on digital

As brands and organisations operate around a specified number of business goals (usually 3-4), so must you as a founder, CEO, director or buzzing entrepreneur anticipate economic crash and downturn periods by setting crisis objectives for digital.

How many businesses whether B2B or B2C are still glued to those strategies even in crisis?

When setting out crisis objectives for digital, visualise them as the guidepoints awakening a new direction within your product or service being beneficial and reassuring for distressed or panicky consumers within the economy. Your ideal customer or client express more frugality within their buyer behaviour, however this doesn’t mean they’ve stopped purchasing anything.

To inspire single parents through weekly lifestyle hacks when raising children through tough times

By reviewing each of these objectives, you can position your product or service within contextual value on digital cleverly; thereby tapping into the human psyche and emotions of potential customers and clients by reassurance and upliftment through your nation’s economic hardship.

The first objective is a perfect opportunity to harness a video on YouTube or a motivational image meme on Instagram or Facebook, whereas objective #2 evidently sets up marketers for an interactive email campaign where you can gather feedback from how you can help your e-commerce customers directly during COVID-19 or any other international crisis.

With objective #3, this can leverage your blog portfolio where you’ll be addressing consumers with potential financial or relationship challenges about how uplifting themselves as a role model towards their offspring in an inevitable yet temporary spin of life.

It’s you that knows how your brand or business operates to survive and capitalise, yet drafted crisis objectives stashed to one side WILL come in handy for maximum effect and profitable remembrance.

Select 3 marketing channels with human touch

During hard times of crisis either building or breaking mankind, every online user wants reassurance, satisfaction and clarity of their next move in life.

As the traditional economy faces a temporary pause, your business’ digital economy must start playing its course to adapt to change. The crisis eras are not like back in late 1930s in the US or early 2000s worldwide; we have more marketing channels and digital communication at our dispense as marketers and businesses.

Analyse your current audience and which online marketing channels they are most responsive to as a human being. These are the touchpoints you optimise in alignment with a tweaked digital strategy to accustom any crisis conditions, before speaking back humanely to boost one’s morale.

Our team have analysed different marketing channels within our past and up-to-date work within diverse sectors, holding strong beliefs towards social media, email and content marketing as the 3 main digital channels presenting human touch during any economic state.

The main goal of social media is to interact and engage with its users by digital nature, allowing people to voice out their opinions liberally without hindrance. Businesses during any crisis period must position themselves as ‘social initiators‘ of positivity and realism within affected nations and their industry, whilst monitoring their key consumers’ conversations and optimise content to engage and deliver reminiscent results that people, instituitions and other organisations will respect and value at post- crisis period.

However, email and content marketing share one major thing in common for people with uncertainty of a brighter tomorrow; direct communication targeting a direct audience of consumers.

When optimised correctly during any global crisis era, email campaigns embedded with relevant content that inspires or educates can drive great engagement, CTRs and awareness to even newer subscribers if cross-channelled across adaptive landing pages for your business offering.

Whatever the widespread crisis we’re facing in life, never overlook marketing channels with potential to adapt your tone of voice as we’re all humans with digital initiative.

Despite everyday news during any crisis inundating us with negativity, this is your opportunity within your business online to be the ‘positive news reporter‘.

Let’s be real; the news be it BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera and so on is almost 3 quarters negative as this is what’s considered interesting and newsworthy to monetise from within the media & broadcasting industry. As any marketing leader or business pro of today, observe the flaws and resolve with a solution in your industry and other interconnected ones too.

If you hear news about unemployment rates rising = draft a blog about developing high income skills and building a pro’s profile.

News report about crime rates & incidents increasing = Record a video about keeping productive and focusing on personal development (even industry-related if possible) for IGTV, Facebook or YouTube.

News report about companies going into administration = Create a display campaign on Google offering educational courses for start-ups to established brands on crisis & financial management and survival know-how.

People may not be converting into customers or clientele from such content creation overnight, yet you’re delivering something different back to your community with the millions of eyes turning to the internet for pain alleviation, predictions and solutions during an economic crisis.

Evaluate performance and adjust accordingly for Future crisis

With crises happening every 10 years or so, it’s worthwhile as a business owner, founder or director to consider assessing your marketing performance and activity after performing the aforementioned and adjust for any future crisis.

As the world’s economic activity is unpredictable with uncontrollable affairs of life such as health pandemic outbreaks and environmental aftermath from industrious organisations using and exploiting natural resources; our industries are interlinked within how people make their livelihood.

If your crisis marketing campaigns may resort in laying off employees or downsizing, consider keeping your digital presence for profitability alive by hiring a few influencers with prominent impact; or even getting in touch with a creative marketing agency as secondary manpower.

By evaluating your digital activity and marketing operations in the marketplace, you fortify your business’ positioning to become recession-proof whilst also conserving your budgetary power and expenses.

Crisis may affect everybody at that particular time, yet don’t allow crisis to affect your bread-and-butter to the table as a marketer and active business.